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Chapter 1 Rewriting the History of Empathy from Socrates to Scheler

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Chapter 1 Rewriting the History of Empathy from Socrates to Scheler Chapter 1 Rewriting the History of Empathy from Socrates to Scheler Abstract This inquiry into the philosophical history of empathy will proceed from the following position. While we live in an understanding of what is empathy, and appreciate that empathy is central to our relations with other human beings, we really do not know what it is. Notwithstanding the excellent research that has already occurred, tradition has made empathy nearly inaccessible. The goal is to unblock our access to empathy by implementing the possibilities of an empathic inquiry. Of course, this is a bootstrap operation that has many interpretive (hermeneutic) overtones. In order to get started, the idea is to let our Socratic ignorance step into the foreground. This includes work with the ideas of Socrates, Aristotle, St. Augustine, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Theodor Lipps, Sigmund Freud. This will enrich both the concept of empathy and its concrete application in terms of human interrelations. Naturally, this requires a delicate balancing act in unpacking the rich intellectual traditions from which empathy—the phenomenon itself, not the word--emerged historically. A Working Definition of Empathy The history of empathy is not the history of different answers to one and the same question, but the history of a complex thicket of overlapping and related problems, constantly changing, whose proposed solutions are also changing with it. Of course, this paraphrases R.G. Collingwood’s account of historical dynamics in his An Autobiography . The relationship is many-to-many. We get different answers to different questions; and even the same answer to different questions. The same answer to different questions is a characteristic of the field where empathy is proposed as a solution to problems in aesthetics, ethics, and the phenomenology of human interrelations. Thus, a further word of caution. There is no necessary something = x that represents the concept empathy in all its themes and variations. To be sure, there is an initial something, Page 1 of 68© Lou Agosta, Ph.D. Please send comments to [email protected] including the unrelated sequential and simultaneous emergence of related conceptual distinctions in parallel areas in moral sentiments (e.g., Hume), the communicability of affect (Kant), aesthetics (e.g., Lipps), phenomenology (e.g., Scheler, Husserl), Heidegger’s hermeneutic reaction to the latter, etc. However, unlike a biological species undergoing variation and natural selection and struggling for survival in the environment, a concept can acquire properties, traits, characteristics in a Lamarckian fashion and pass them on to subsequent implementations (Toulmin 1972). There may simply be no natural kind named by “empathy,” but rather three (or more) dynamically converging and diverging intellectual traditions that have interacted – interbred if you will – and produced a mongrel offspring that we currently call “empathy.” The matter is further complicated since, within a given lineage, whatever concept is present can undergo internal transformation as a function of what Ian Hacking (1999) calls “dynamic nominalism.” Thanks to the work of Lauren Wispé, there is agreement on who said what about empathy and when it was said. 1 Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. Similarly to the way that Foucault’s history of unreason (madness) illuminates reason, what was left unsaid about empathy but shown by means of distinctions in otherness illuminates empathy as much as what was explicitly stated. 2 For example, while Heidegger is dismissive about the term “empathy” 1 Lauren Wispé. (1987). “History of the concept of empathy” in Empathy and its Development , eds., N. Eisenberg & J. Strayer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 2 Michel Foucault. (1961). History of Madness , trs. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. London: Routledge, 2006. Page 2 of 68© Lou Agosta, Ph.D. Please send comments to [email protected] [Einfühlung ], he holds open the possibility of authentic being with others. Such a way of being authentic with others is tantalizingly hinted at and yet remains undeveloped as most of the effort in relating to others is dedicated to the inauthentic “they self” (“the one”) and the isolated individualization of human being in the face of death. Yet the logical space is still available for an account, not exactly Heideggerian but in the spirit of Being and Time , of authentic being with one another. Of course, this could not be taken for granted and had to be argued for in detail. The entire Chapter with which this work began was devoted to it, and the argument ascended in proper Heideggerian fashion from the application of affectivity to empathy through a progressive ascent in the sense of an unpacking, making explicit, and abstraction of empathic receptivity into empathic understanding, interpretation, and speech of authentic being with one another. In a sense, this analysis is whole and complete in itself. It has many engaging consequences. The affectivity in which empathy is disclosed is the feeling of respect. Respect discloses the otherness of the other. The understanding that is grasped in that of the other’s possibility. The interpretation of the possibility is as ways of being in the world with one another. The speech in which empathy is articulated is as a gracious, generous listening. A similar logic applies to several other key thinkers who bear witness to the development of the concept of empathy, even while naming it in diverging ways. As noted in the introduction, a clearing will be created for empathy by distinguishing what is said about empathy from what is shown about it by the distinctions actually deployed in the works of various thinkers. We live in an understanding of empathy and use it everyday. Yet it is covered up by the diversity of intellectual traditions and meanings that have drawn on Page 3 of 68© Lou Agosta, Ph.D. Please send comments to [email protected] and contributed to trying to understand human interrelations. These traditions extend from aesthetics to ethics as well as more mainline engagements with accessing the experiences of others cognitively. For example, although Hume calls out the word “sympathy,” this overlaps substantially with what readers, informed by Edmund Husserl and modern psychotherapy, understand by “empathy.” In short, Hume speaks in such a way that we hear in the word “sympathy” an interpersonal “glue” that contributes to social relations and the formation of communities. We understand that Theodor Lipps’ use of Einfühlung (empathy) was most responsible for popularizing the term in the context of his theory of beauty. With the domination of Lipps’s projective empathy, it was nearly impossible for thinkers as diverse as Freud and Husserl to use the term without invoking Lipps’ theory of aesthetics in which the world is infused with life – humanized - by man’s attribution of emotional life to nature. Freud’s methods were empathic to a high degree, yet he hardly used the term. It is a further complication, not available to Wispé in 1987, that the discovery in neurology of mirror neurons has provided Lipps with an ex post facto justification of his definition of empathy as inner imitation. 3 This might in itself be warrant for reopening the conversation about the history, since the results in neurology have occasioned an explosion of interest in empathy in cognitive science, psychology, psychiatry, and mental health. 4 In addition, a careful reading of Hume shows that his concept of empathy evolves from sympathy as 3 V. Gallese. (2001).“The ‘shared manifold’ hypothesis: from mirror neurons to empathy, ” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, No. 5-7, (2001) 30-50. 4 For example, Empathy and Mental Illness , eds. T. Farrow and P. Woodruff, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. L. Jackson, A. N. Meltzoff, and J. Decety. (2005). “How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy.” Neuroimage 24 (2005): 771-779. Other Minds: How Humans Bridge the Divide Between Self and Others , eds. B.F. Malle & S.D. Hodges, New York: Guilford Press, 2005. See also J. Decety & P.L. Jackson. (2004). “The functional architecture of human empathy,” Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews , Vol 3, No. 2, June 2004: 71-100. Page 4 of 68© Lou Agosta, Ph.D. Please send comments to [email protected] social glue, to a “delicate sympathy” in moral relations, “delicacy of taste” in aesthetics, and, finally being degraded to a “power of suggestion and emotional contagion.” On the other hand, in the writings of Husserl, “empathy” moves progressively from the margins and periphery of intersubjectivity (“community of monads”) towards its center and foundation, especially if Husserl’s Nachlass are considered in addition to his published statements. Anyone writing about empathy is trying to hit a moving target. To a high degree, empathy is a concept or set of closely related concepts with intellectual roots the diverse traditions of aesthetics, ethics, and the dynamics of human understanding. A working definition of “empathy” will be useful. This was argued for in detail in Chapter ___ when we engaged with Heidegger. At the level of phenomenal awareness and everyday human being in the world with other humans, the minimal essential constituents of empathy include: (i) a receptivity (“openness”) to the affects of others whether in face-to-face encounter or as artifacts of human imagination (“empathic receptivity”); (ii) an understanding of the other in which the other individual is interpreted as a possibility—a possibility of choosing, making commitments, and implementing them (“empathic understanding”) in which the aforementioned possibility is implemented; (iii) an interpretation of the other from first-, second-, and third-person perspectives (“empathic interpretation”); and (iv) an articulation in language of this receptivity, understanding and interpretation, including the form of speech known as listening that enables the other to appreciate that he or she has been the target of empathy (“empathic listening”).
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